What We're Watchin'

The Legion of Desks that is our conscious mind has been recently rejoined by an old favorite: the Television Desk.  Over the years and without our notice, we've been slowly weaning ourselves off of the boob tube, particularly after the post-2K collapse of network broadcasting.  For years now, the television has just been for movies and HBO, sports, news commentary, and comedy, and then we dropped most of the movies and all but the major sporting events.  So our TV consumption is now reduced to just HBO series, championship sporting events, and news commentary and comedy, with a sizable overlap in the last two categories.

Recently though, after we finally got our television hardwired to the internet, we've started binge-watching Netflix and Amazon Prime original programming.  Last week, we completed the breezy and entertaining The Marvelous Mrs.Maisel (Amazon Prime), and between Saturday and last night, we watched all 17 hours of Seasons 1 and 2 of Netflix' Stranger Things.

We liked it, and find it hard to imagine who wouldn't.  The plot is a sly mix of the best sci-fi and horror movies out there.  It's sort of Stand By Me meets Poltergeist meets Carrie meets ET meets Stargate meets Cloverfield, with some episodes channeling Gremlins, Jurassic Park and Aliens, with none other than Paul Reiser himself dropping Aliens lines and references like Easter eggs were going out of style.  But rather than just being a disjointed amalgam of references, tributes, and rip-offs, the plot is quite cohesive and logical.  It all holds together and it all works.  It was fun and even though at its heart it's really just a monster movie, it was more entertaining than scary.

The real loser here is the Video Games Desk, as the Television Desk has been hogging all of the available free time away from the VGD.  Out poor vault-dweller has been abandoned and forgotten somewhere in Fallout 76's West Virginia, Bayek was last seen chasing something through the desert in Assassin's Creed Origins, and we have no idea what planet we were last exploiting in No Man's Sky. But what we do know is that with Stranger Things now under our belt, we're off tonight to start on our next series, whatever that may be.